Communist cars

Junk box

The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History. By Jason Vuic. Hill and Wang; 272 pages; $26. Buy from Amazon.com

COMPETITION for the title of the worst car in the world is stiff. Aficionados of communist-era automobile disasters remember with fondness the East German Trabant, whose sputtering two-stroke engine and resinated papier-mâché bodywork barely deserved the devotion lavished on it by that country's frustrated car-lovers. But even the Trabant was a luxury sedan compared with the Soviet Zaporozhets, a parody of a proper car notable for its gnat-sized and fire-prone engine.

These vehicles, along with their unmourned kin—Polonezes, Dacias, Wartburgs and Volgas—dominated their home markets in the planned economies of the Soviet empire. They represented the pinnacle of consumer aspirations, attainable for humble private citizens only after many years on a waiting list.

But few of them came to the attention of Western car-buyers. The big exception was the product of the Zastava factory in the former socialist Yugoslavia. The Yugo (named after a south-easterly wind, not the country) became briefly, in the 1980s, a mass-market car in America, selling more than 100,000.

Jason Vuic provides a thoroughly researched and illuminating account of what turned into a spectacular disaster. The idea of selling the Yugo in North America, as pushed by an energetic but flaky American entrepreneur, Malcolm Bricklin, sounded compelling. The Yugo was admittedly neither stylish nor powerful, but it was indubitably cheap, selling for under $4,000, far less than any other new car on the market. It was, in essence, an obsolescent Fiat, based on technology acquired from the Italian car giant in a trade deal a decade earlier. Boosting America's trade with Yugoslavia—in those days communist-run but not in the Kremlin camp—was politically popular in both countries. The idea of a reliable, no-frills car from an exotic source attracted millions of dollars' worth of media coverage.

The only flaw was the car itself. Even after strenuous efforts to raise quality control at the Zastava plant, it was still hopelessly unreliable, and obsolete by the standards of the modern auto industry. The verdict of outside commentators was damning and unanimous. For the price of a new Yugo, consumers would find a second-hand car (of almost any kind) better value. The Yugo became a butt of jokes, rather as the Czechoslovak Skoda and Soviet Lada did in Europe. It was even described, unfairly, as dangerous. It wasn't. But sales plummeted, and Mr Bricklin, not for the first time in his chequered business career, moved on swiftly from a collapsing company.

Mr Vuic spends rather too long on the business intricacies of the American end of the story. Tantalisingly underexplored is the clash between the low productivity, collectivist and decisionless culture of the Zastava plant and the go-getting American partners, determined, however quixotically, to make the Yugo into a world-beater. In fairness, he might also have mentioned that the quest was not inherently ridiculous. Other ex-communist countries, from worse starting places than Yugoslavia, have made a huge success of their auto industries, producing inexpensive and reliable cars for export customers. The real problem with the Yugo was that it failed in the world's most demanding car market. Other east European cars of that era never even got far enough to try.